First release of Clutter Grilo Player

Last weeks I’ve been playing with Clutter and Mx libraries, with the idea of knowing them deeper while also trying to help a bit. Honestly, I believe that the best way to learn about such things is just creating something using them.

So, knowing the fantastic effort done by Grilo team at Igalia, to create a framework for accessing different multimedia sources across the internet, I came to the idea of creating a very simple media player that uses MX widgets, Gstreamer, and Grilo framework.

And here it is, the first release of Clutter Grilo Player. It’s still dirty, but the general idea of the interface is there. It supports browsing and searching some Grilo providers, including Youtube and others.

One hint about the Grilo usage, when you browse or search for content you may want to add GRL_RESOLVE_FAST_ONLY to the flags parameter and then use grl_metadata_source_metadata() to retrieve non-fast keys for specific media when you actually need them.

An example of this is Youtube and the media URL’s (each video requires a separate http request to obtain the media URL) so if you browse 100 items and request the URL in the browse operation you will be issuing 101 http requests even if you don’t play a single video.

As a general rule I would go with using the fast-only flag in browse and search operations and then, when you really need some metadata (like the URL) for an specific media item, if you don’t have it already you can issue a metadata() operation requesting it (without the FAST_ONLY flag in this case). This way you get the metadata you need when you need it in the most efficient way possible.

I would suspect that’s due to an old icon theme. We made several changes to support Mx in the icon theme, last time I saw Ubuntu were shipping an old ‘nbtk era’ version of all that stuff which is likely to be the issue. Not the end of the world though.